Loco – Cheap Thrills Read Online Mary B. Moore

Categories Genre: Alpha Male Tags Authors: Mary B. Moore Advertisement1

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And Sayla, God, the way she looked today. Laughing with her sister, dancing with Kaida for a minute in the shade, the way she bent down to help Kairo with his frosting-smeared cupcake and kissed the top of his head without even thinking twice that’s what life should be about. Them.

If I could, I wanted to give them everything—the kids, Sayla—all of it, the world.

But some part of me always pulled back. Because even now, in the quiet after the day's storm, I couldn’t forget what I knew.

After Simon Cliffe was arrested, and the adrenaline wore off, I’d seen the truth of what he had planned. What was waiting on the other side of that snatch-and-grab if Brenda from the daycare hadn’t tackled him like a linebacker. There was stuff I’d never unsee—transport plans, holding locations, and “conditioning methods.”

They didn’t care that Kairo was three years old, that Kaida still clutched a stuffed animal to sleep. To them, they were products. Property.

I’d nearly thrown up reading some of it.

So, when Judd floated the idea of flipping Cliffe instead of locking him up, I hated it—and I still did. But he was right. It was a tough call that sat like a rock in my gut, but releasing Cliffe under tight, unblinking surveillance and letting him run back to his people was paying off.

The information he was providing was invaluable. We now had more names, drop points, and code words. And more than that, it connected dots we’d suspected but never been able to prove—crooked cops, real estate coercion, and Randolph fucking Topper.

They’d been targeting residents who were minorities—intimidating them and pushing them into moving drugs, transporting cash, or just plain leaving town. And once they were gone, their homes—worth hundreds of thousands—were scooped up for pennies on the dollar by shell companies and “developers” with ties to people who were supposed to protect them.

It made my blood boil.

Imogen was already working quietly in the background, taking statements from residents and making sure their stories were documented safely and discreetly. So, when we brought this to the DA, we wouldn’t just have criminal charges. We’d have people and faces.

And when that day came—and it was coming—I’d be able to look Sayla in the eye, look those kids in the eyes, and know I’d done something right.

As if the whole damn thing wasn’t heavy enough already, there was one more name—one more target—we needed to bring down.

Cliffe had never said it directly, he was too careful for that. When we’d asked who was pulling the strings, the one making the real calls, the person you'd go to if you needed someone taken out, he’d skirted around it. He didn’t offer a name, he just said, “There’s only one guy who handles that.”

He wouldn’t speak it out loud, like just saying the name would get him killed. But he agreed he'd go straight to the source when we’d cut him loose, wired up, and watched like a hawk.

And through that wire, we finally got a name. Titian.

Not Titan. No, that would’ve made sense. This guy had gone with the extra vowel like it meant something. Maybe it did, perhaps it didn’t. Maybe he thought it made him sound classy, dangerous, and untouchable. Or maybe he just couldn’t spell.

Whatever the reason, it was the only thing we had on him.

We ran facial recognition through every system we could access—state, federal, everything. Nothing. It was like he didn’t exist. Even the driver’s license we had a photo of, thanks to Cliffe, was clean—no record, no prior addresses, no flags. Just a grainy image, an ID number, and a name that could’ve been printed on Monopoly money for all it was worth.

But according to Cliffe, this ghost of a man had ordered the hit on Kaden Roper, the kid we’d found in the same woods as Ailee. Nineteen years old, smart and grounded, with his whole life in front of him. And just like that, he was gone. Another target in a long line of people who’d gotten in their way or refused to play along.

Sometimes, having most of the answers just made it worse. You think it’d help, give you clarity, closure—but it doesn’t. Not when you can’t finish the story. Not when the killer was still walking around, untraceable, hiding behind a name that didn’t even mean anything.

It made every second feel like a ticking clock. And when you’re the one they’ve marked—the one they think will break the rest, it changes how you view an investigation.

Cliffe’s voice recordings confirmed it. They were still watching me and talking about using me by pressuring Judd and intimidating the people around me so that the rest of our team would fold and they could go back to running their crooked operation in peace.

Topper had set that up, he and the other cops who’d sold out long before we ever caught wind of it. They’d painted targets on our backs and handed out the bullets, and turned us into bait so they could keep lining their pockets and taking homes from people who didn’t have the power to fight back.


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